Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been on Mastodon for nearly two years. It has been interesting learning the new culture. I tend to take people at face value there so, when someone asked why their posts weren’t gaining engagement, I responded with some suggestions. It wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
Here or There
They were very polite about it but it was clear from their original posting and their follow up that there was a mismatch. First, Mastodon is not an engagement social media platform. You still people bemoaning low engagement (few boosts, few likes, few followers) in comparison to what they experienced on Twitter or Instagram or whatever. Usually it is because they are not using hashtags, or following hashtags to see how to use them. If there is one thing people new to Mastodon should do, it’s to use and follow hashtags.
The other mismatch comes around blasting content onto a media platform. There are media companies and people marketing products on Mastodon. But, in my experience, they tend to actually be on Mastodon and have created a user base by being there. If you are just pushing media to Mastodon, people may realize you are not actually part of the community.
I went and scanned through their posts and suggested some ways they could use hashtags to create broader reach. Some other people made similar suggestions. The response was that they used WordPress to push out their content to multiple platforms, including Mastodon, so customizing the posts was tricky. Automation wasn’t possible and manually adding tags might not scale. There is some discussion on whether there’s a way to push hashtags with a post from WordPress to Mastodon followers.
These are very real hurdles. I do wonder if this whole approach is scalable though. For nearly a decade, we had a very rigid social media environment. The toxicity of many of the closed gardens has meant that some people have moved away from these monolithic structures.
They’re hurdles that libraries have faced. To reach your audience, do you need a Facebook page? Instagram account? Tiktok? Second Life? Truth Social? LinkedIn profile? There are so many decision points: are people who use your resources or buy your products or services going to (a) be on those platforms AND (b) want to see you there? And how many platforms can you manage? As that Mastodon conversation indicated: if it can be automated, it may scale. If it’s manual? It can’t, and you’ll need to be selective.
The challenge is that, even if you can automate your syndication, then what? This WordPress blog I’m on can be configured to syndicate to multiple platforms. But should it, unless I can also visit those platforms and interact with the people who are engaging with my syndicated posts? Is blasting into the nethersphere a sound information engagement strategy unless it includes manual follow up?
P.O.S.S.E.
I learned recently a term for something I believe in: own your own stuff. Publish (Your) Own Stuff, Syndicate Everywhere was the shorthand I learned. Contrast with Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. Also new to me as a term, but familiar as a library challenge.
POSSE assumes resources. You need money, or time, or technical skills, to be able to have a platform that you manage and whose availability you can control. Small organizations, including a lot of libraries, can’t manage that. PESOS is easier, because someone else is picking up the infrastructure but may disappear in the future (functionally or literally). Twitter, anyone?
One thing I like about POSSE is that it doesn’t mean you have to choose to isolate yourself in a given closed garden. Instead, you can create your own publicly available content. Then, if you want to inject it into a closed garden like Facebook or Twitter, you can. I have only dabbled with those platforms but, from what I can tell, it is easier to publish into them than to publish outwards from within them.
POSSE has the nice added benefit that you can publish information in a location where you can manage tracking and privacy. I like to publish openly to the web but I think you can at least give people the option to sign into your site rather than signing into a site for Meta or X. I love Anne Applebaum’s writing about Russia and she is a regular contributor for The Atlantic. But you can also access her Atlantic articles on her own website. I think it’s powerful when a writer maintains control of their information so they can publish it where they want. Contrast that to the folks who wrote for MTV News and saw all of their historic work flushed away when Paramount removed it from the web.
I like the concept of syndication. This blog is syndicated to LexBlog (there’s a law library channel but I’m the only one in it?). LexBlog created a partnership with the American Bar Association, called American Legal Blogger. It uses the same channels, so I appear there as well.
When I was doing media for my brother’s case, I would often prioritize follow up with a journalist who wrote for a piece that I knew would be syndicated. Syndication is, in my experience, more valuable than any individual media platform’s reach.
In fact, syndication that takes content from one media platform and publishes it in the same format on another platform seems like the ideal situation. No one is expecting me to show up on LexBlog for a chat. It’s a piece to be read.
Syndication Isn’t Social
It feels wrong to call social media blasts syndication. In general, you are sending out a teaser: an image, a headline, a short description, and a link to get people to the content. It would be different if the information were to be ingested in its entirety. Social media has suffered because it is considered a broadcast media by publishers rather than an interactive medium for individuals.
That isn’t to say that broadcast media can’t be shared on social media. But we get back to .resources: you need the time or money or technical expertise to be present on social media. Lots of people I follow on Mastodon share articles they read. This website, and most others, are optimized to include Open Graph information. It’s the information embedded in a publisher’s website that turns a basic link, when placed into a social media post or a Teams channel post, an image and some additional content.
Where I wonder if POSSE will go astray is that there is no technical limit to “Syndicate Everywhere.” But, while the technology will scale and allow me to post to Facestatokix, I can’t and do not want to have to also maintain a presence on all of those platforms. There is a need, at some point, to be authentic and present and, frankly, selective.
It’s not surprising to me that there has been a return back to email as a primary syndication route. It’s a technology that anyone can have without requiring a platform credential. In the cases where it’s monetized, a person can opt-in to pay to follow a publisher or to read full content. Emails can be customized in a way that can feel personalized and a mechanism can be allowed to enable email recipients to respond and interact. We’ve seen a lot of the online commenting options disappear on news media platforms, for reasons that may be as much legal as social.
I also hold out hope that we may once again cycle back to RSS. I mean, it’s got the flipping syndication in its actual name! But I think we remain a long way from it being a big resource, unless we return to a feed reader that is promoted by a very large media platform, like Google Reader was. The possibility of monetizing RSS has some possibilities that might change that game. For now, we will deal with apps like Google News and Flipboard which functionally grab RSS or equivalent feeds and present them to us as if they were curated.
There must be a way to capture the marketing data around syndication. If it’s effective, then why aren’t the tools available. If it’s not effective, why do people continue to attempt it. Effectiveness can mean a lot of things but to many people concerned with syndication, it comes down to money. Money in purchases, or in increased funding due to increased foot traffic or interactions or other service-level metric justifications. Surely it has to do with more than number of followers and number of clicks.
Platform also makes a difference. I think Mastodon may be the most revenue-averse platform I’ve ever been on. The occasional crafts person plugs their wares but, for the most part, my experience has been commercial free. It may be that marketers are used to how the more toxic platforms work and may not be interested in investing the resources to understand how different models can be as effective.